January 9th, 2009
Amazon EC2 launches Web-based management console
Amazon Web Services announced a Web-based management console for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
According to Amazon’s Web Services blog, the console allows you to access your environment with a user name or password. It adds:
No more certificates or public/secret keys to manage! If you’re like me, I never seem to have my own computer at hand when I need to check the status of the Amazon EC2 farm, or for that matter when I need to launch a new instance. It’s a lot easier to log in with a username and password than to use those same credentials to retrieve my keys, configure Firefox (if it’s even on the borrowed computer) and then log in.
Cloud Ave notes that’s Amazon’s love for usernames and passwords are a security risk, but you can’t argue the ease of use. Personally, I wouldn’t want my infrastructure riding on a username and password–they are too easy to break. Give me those complicated secret keys.
Amazon has also added a few other bells and whistles with AJAX and added that it will begin to layer other user interface tweaks on top of its services.
Also see: Migrating to Amazon Web Services: The blueprint
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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